This story about Obambi flying his Chicago personal trainer to DC every week (estimated carbon emissions: 50,000 pounds per year) made me think. Mary Bono Mack, one of a handful of GOP House members who voted for cap and trade, was the first certified physical fitness instructor elected to Congress. I call for bipartisanship. (Via InstaPundit.)

Public figures decide they ought to record their interactions with the media to prevent fanciful quotations. Twenty years ago—cue the harp music!—the local newspaper took some interest in a long-duration B-1 mission our team flew. The reporter showed up to interview the aircraft commander. He asked if he could record the interview. No problem, said our intrepid aviator, because I’ll be recording it myself.

He was repeatedly rejected by military recruiters and got into uniform at 16 after lying about his age. But Frank Buckles would later become the last surviving U.S. veteran of World War I.

Buckles, who also survived being a civilian POW in the Philippines in World War II, died of natural causes Sunday at his home in Charles Town, biographer and family spokesman David DeJonge said in a statement. He was 110.

Michael Barone doesn’t put it that way, but he revisits the question of middle-class, non-college educated white people are voting for the GOP and against socialism:

Liberal writers look back to 1973 as a year when real wages supposedly peaked -- just before a nasty bout of inflation. But back then, a pocket calculator cost $110. The smartphone you can buy today for $200 has a calculator and hundreds of other devices.

If you get out beyond the Beltway to Middle America, you find supermarkets with wonderful produce and big box stores with amazing variety, all at prices that are astonishingly low. You can eat well and dress stylishly at prices far below what elites in places like Washington and New York are accustomed to paying. In many ways, people with modest incomes have a significantly better standard of living than they did four decades ago.

So it’s about technology providing a better absolute standard of living over time to the middle class, not their relative standard of living compared to the wealthy. That same reasoning explains why economically liberated but politically deprived Chinese are not in revolt.

I’d add this with respect to America: The middle class is rightly convinced that, in the long run, socialism is a scam, and it will provide them no better material results than freedom can, and a lot more aggravation.